An exchange is a central marketplace with established rules and regulations where buyers and sellers meet to trade. Some exchanges, referred to as open outcry exchanges, operate using a trading floor where buyers and sellers physically meet on the floor to trade. Other exchanges, referred to as electronic exchanges, operate by an electronic or telecommunications network instead of a trading floor to facilitate trading in an efficient, versatile, and functional manner. Electronic exchanges have made it possible for an increasing number of people to actively participate in a market at any given time. The increase in the number of potential market participants has advantageously led to, among other things, a more competitive market and greater liquidity.
With respect to electronic exchanges, buyers and sellers may log onto an electronic exchange trading platform by way of a communication link through their user terminals. Once connected, buyers and sellers may typically choose which tradeable objects they wish to trade. As used herein, the term “tradeable object” refers to anything that can be traded with a quantity and/or price. It includes, but is not limited to, all types of traded events, goods and/or financial products, which can include, for example, stocks, options, bonds, futures, currency, and warrants, as well as funds, derivatives and collections of the foregoing, and all types of commodities, such as grains, energy, and metals. The tradeable object may be “real,” such as products that are listed by an exchange for trading, or “synthetic,” such as a combination of real products that is created by the user. A tradeable object could actually be a combination of other tradeable objects, such as a class of tradeable objects.
To profit in electronic markets, market participants must be able to assimilate large amounts of data in order to recognize market trends and to view current market conditions. Screen space is often an important factor for a trader to consider when he/she sets up a trading workstation, since the screen space directly affects the trader's ability to quickly view and process market data. Many traders use one large monitor running at a very high resolution in an effort to get the maximum amount of data onto the screen. However, in today's information-intensive markets, to be successful, traders often need to simultaneously view multiple trading interfaces, charts, industry news, spreadsheets, as well as other information. Since each application-created interface has at least one window, a single monitor does not allow a trader to simultaneously view data on multiple windows, and the time it takes the trader to flip between the windows does not make the single monitor the most optimal trading workspace solution.
Therefore, many traders use multiple monitors to avoid flipping from one window to another, and to efficiently view all windows simultaneously. However, traders with multiple monitors can actually only look closely at one monitor at a time. Although the human peripheral field of vision is 180°, the field of foveal vision (the region of the visual field where the user has the greatest visual activity) is approximately 2°. Therefore, a trader can only attend to a small part of each display at any one point in time. When a trader's gaze returns to a monitor after some period of time, it is simple to observe the current state of the application, but, especially with a real-time application like a trading interface or any other graphical display of time-varying data, it will not be easy for a trader to determine what has occurred during the time interval when the trader was looking elsewhere. As a trader uses more monitors, the trader may miss many important trading opportunities by not being able to simultaneously view data that are displayed on different monitors. Therefore, it would be beneficial to provide a system that could be used by a trader to improve his awareness of market events when the trader is using more than one monitor.